Alex Olson, Kristin Dickson-Okuda, Gillian Garcia and Shin Okuda

Slip Covers

June 26 - August 25, 2018

Blue Projects is pleased to present Slip Covers, an exhibition bringing together the work of four Los Angeles-based artists and designers. The works on show include paintings, coats, furniture and a film that explore the potential to create a concentrated experience. The intricacies of individual perception are at the core of the exhibition, offering meditations on the effects of colour and form, and how we take in information.

Alex Olson’s oil paintings created for this exhibition are small and intimate in scale. They are produced as tools for the viewer, each one made for a different outcome, such as “for focus” or “for energy”. Specific combinations of colour and elemental brushstrokes act as sites of contemplation that engage the eye and brain towards these specific ends. Kristin Dickson-Okuda’s coats are made from dyed silk organza using natural ingredients known for their medicinal properties. The visitor is invited to select a coat to wear while engaging with the exhibition. The palette and related plant spectrum for the coats were created in collaboration with Sasha Duerr, basing the selection on natural dyes with historical healing applications. Shin Okuda’s furniture offers interludes of physical contemplation while Gillian Garcia’s film, The Secret Sound, explores sensorial engagement, reflecting on the experiential propositions permeating the exhibition.

Alex Olson is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. She is represented by Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Altman Siegel, San Francisco, and Laura Bartlett, London.

Kristin Dickson-Okuda is an artist and designer living and working in Los Angeles. Her design work, produced under the name Rowena Sartin, focuses on the expressive potential of clothing and the various environments it can occupy. Dickson-Okuda also runs a multi-faceted space called iko iko – an open studio, showroom and event space ongoing since 2009. For this exhibition, Dickson-Okuda has collaborated with Sasha Duerr, an artist and designer who works with plant-based palettes, natural dyes and place-based recipes. Duerr is a professor at the California College of the Arts with a joint appointment in Textiles and Fine Arts where she designs curriculum and teaches courses in the intersection of natural colour, slow food, fashion and social practice. She is the author of The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes (Timber Press / Workman, 2011) and Natural Color (Watson-Guptill / Ten Speed Press, 2016).

Gillian Garcia is a filmmaker and photographer working in Los Angeles.

Shin Okuda runs an LA-based studio called WAKA WAKA focusing on wood furniture and functional objects that he designs and crafts by hand. Okuda was born in Fukuoka, Japan and now lives and works in Los Angeles.